Doctors are on strike, and entrepreneurs should be ashamed

While entrepreneurs hide in dark corners, ashamed before the Minister of Finance who has placed seven or eight billion budget kuna on their table, which they have not used to stimulate the economy, doctors are still on strike.

Every entrepreneur who has, according to some virtual calculation, fifty kuna left this year, covers their ears for not investing that money in creating a new job and thus disappointing the minister to the point that he has not even noticed how much this country is now bearing the cost of the three-week doctors’ strike.

Every planned, yet unperformed, operation or just an examination has some financial repercussions for those who have been left without medical services due to the doctors’ strike. And so it goes several thousand times. Since no one in this country deals with such calculations, we can only speculate on the cost of the consequences of the strike. It would be much easier to see how much this strike is costing the state treasury. One only needs to multiply the number of doctors on strike by the amount of their salaries and other compensations that they still receive while not working. But even the Minister of Health does not feel the need to disclose that information to the public.

However, what is truly astonishing in the story of the doctors’ strike is that they continue to strike and that there seems to be no end in sight. For those who may have forgotten in the meantime, doctors went on strike due to the price of their on-call duty, overtime hours, and standby hours (when they must be ready to respond to a call over the weekend and cannot go anywhere). Thus, one category of employees whose salaries have not felt the years-long crisis in the economy at any moment, nor have they decreased or ever been delayed, has been on strike for a full three weeks (so far!) over a trivial matter on which they have not reached an agreement with the competent minister. Their representatives are engaged in intense negotiations with the minister, there is no agreement, and the strike continues. The possibility of stopping the strike seems non-existent as long as the minister does not agree to all their demands.

Minister Rajko Ostojić has been cornered in a way that he can only get out by throwing ashes on himself and meeting the strikers’ demands. Ostojić is not to blame for proposing the rules of the game that the doctors do not like, but he is co-responsible for the fact that doctors are on strike. Others responsible are his colleagues in the Government who have left him alone to struggle in a dead-end situation created by the fact that in this country it is possible for an entire profession funded by the state budget to strike without consequence for any reason and to fulfill their demands. This is pure blackmail to which the Government does not react, or at least does not react correctly.

The strike must be stopped. And not by forcing Ostojić to accept the blackmail but by compelling the strikers to withdraw their blackmail. And Ostojić cannot accomplish that alone. It is the task of the (decisive) Government. Not only because of this doctors’ strike but to prevent the same senseless strike from occurring in some other category of dissatisfied civil servants. Otherwise, we will all find ourselves in a situation where anyone on the state payroll can strike until their demands are met, where ministers individually lead endless and fruitless negotiations with their representatives, while they regularly receive their salaries, regardless of how much that costs the real sector that funds the same budget.

A good portion of those seven or eight billion kuna that the Minister of Finance speaks of has been directly spent on the doctors’ strike in the last three weeks. It should just be calculated how much. How much has the economy cost, for example, because someone had to extend their sick leave for three weeks because they were not operated on? And so several hundred times. Finally, how much does the economy lose because doctors have not worked for three weeks but still receive salaries and compensations for their on-call duties? Does this concern anyone in this country? And who should be ashamed of this?